


The Adventure of the Flint Axe

by GloriaMundi



Category: Sherlock Holmes & Related Fandoms, Sherlock Holmes (2009)
Genre: AU, Community: au_bingo, Gen, Historical, prehistory
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-07-09
Updated: 2010-07-09
Packaged: 2017-10-10 11:36:27
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 753
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/99302
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/GloriaMundi/pseuds/GloriaMundi
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"Some day ...we shall have no need for spirits. The words of a wise man will stand on their own merit, without recourse to shamans and smoke. We will be guided by our minds."<br/>"You've been eating those mushrooms again, haven't you?" I sighed.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Adventure of the Flint Axe

**Author's Note:**

> written for the 'prehistoric' prompt for [AU Bingo](http://community.livejournal.com/au_bingo/). Many thanks to **lmeden** for beta! This can probably be attributed to a surfeit of Jean Auel at an impressionable age ...

"The spirits have spoken," intoned Omes from his seat on the sacred stone, raising the massive lion-jawbone in his long-fingered hand. "Vil shines, in the spirit world, with the scarlet hue of guilt. It is he who killed out brother Lod. It is his hand that hewed and hefted the axe which slew Lod. It is he who must give his life to balance the lost life of Lod."

"The spirits have spoken!" cried our tribe's chief, Strad. "Vil has slain his fellow! He shall be sent hurrying after Lod, into the dark of death!"

Vil did not speak. He stared sullenly at Omes from where he stood accused between two strong young men of the tribe, neither bound (not until his guilt was certain) nor free to go.

Omes sat, legs crossed, on the great stone at the centre of the circle. His eyes rolled strangely, his limbs twitched loosely, his face was white with clay. At his side, acrid smoke gusted from a black bowl. The air pulsed with the strange singing sound of the bow-shaped object that he held, and plucked, to help him hear the voices that no other could hear. He was in trance. "It must be done," he said, and I could sense the spirits speaking through him.

"Let us take Vil from this sacred place," said Strad. "And send him after Lod whom we have lost."

Very quickly the tribe closed around Vil like hunters around their prey, hurrying him down to the river where the blood would wash him away and take his sins with it. I did not follow them. A healer must not bring death, however well deserved.

"Some day," I said when we were alone and the cries of the hunters grew faint, "the spirits will not speak to you."

Omes fixed me with his keen gaze, suddenly appearing quite ordinary -- or at least as ordinary as he ever did. "The spirits have never spoken to me, Wat," he said. "If there are spirits -- and I have no evidence to suggest that there might be -- they take no interest in us."

"But they guided you to this judgement!" I cried.

"Not at all, old boy," said Omes. "I saw that the axe that slew Lod, the axe that we found in the bushes red with blood, bore the same pattern of knapping as Vil's axe that he said he had lost. And Vil takes his axe in his left hand, not in his right as you or I might do. Lod was killed by a downward blow from behind by a left-handed man. The only other person in the tribe who wields his axe left-handed is Vil's boy, and he is yet too young to strike so hard -- Lod was slain by a single blow . It was plain to me at once that Vil was the killer: but Strad has never listened to my wisdom when I speak with my own voice, and so it was necessary to use another."

"You have lied to show the truth," I said. "But still it is a lie. Could not the spirits --"

"Some day," said Omes dreamily, "we shall have no need for spirits. The words of a wise man will stand on their own merit, without recourse to shamans and smoke. We will be guided by our minds -- not by the imagined voices of those who are dead, and those who never lived."

"We will always wish to believe in something greater, something other than ourselves," I objected. "It is our nature. We must believe that there is something more than this." I waved my hand around, indicating the dark mouth of the cave, the fire before it, the great stone on which Omes sat: meaning, too, the hard months of winter and the good hunting in summer, the place under the trees where the dead were laid to rest with flowers and red ochre, the place where we had buried so many after the choking-sickness, so many that the spirits had not let me save.

"There _is_ something greater than ourselves," said Omes. "There is ... thought. Wisdom. There is something in here --" (he tapped his skull) "-- which is greater than anything I have found in the world. Some day all of us -- or those who have enough wisdom to survive -- will learn that it is so."

"You've been eating those mushrooms again, haven't you?" I sighed. "Some day the spirits will have their revenge on you."

To this Omes had no reply.

-end-


End file.
